Hilary Booth... of course!

Yes, Virginia, it's still snowing. It's supposed to stop sometime overnight. When I left for the CVS meeting, the sidewalks weren't too bad. Now the snow is starting to stick in some places. And I've heard one report suggesting more may be coming next week. Obviously winter around here shows up fashionably late.

For CVS, we had two winners from the "Writers of the Future" contest. Bill Katz won the grand prize in the latest contest and even showed off his shiny trophy. Jonathan Laden brought the framed illustration for his third place story, drawn by the winner of the "Illustrator of the Future" contest. They started off by telling us a lot about the contest, how it worked, and what happened if you won. I remember when the contest first started. I had considered entering back then, but I've never gotten around to it. whytcrow entered for the first quarter, so we'll see if I can muster something for one of the others. I was actually more impressed by them describing the process, especially undergoing the workshop in LA after you won. There was a lot more behind the scenes than just you win and get in the anthology. They also talked about writing in general and how to approach short stories, especially things to look for in first pages. I've heard the "jump right in" type of advice and I tend to like those writers, who dump you into a world and allow you to absorb stuff as you're going along. kaygo's Jani Kilian books are a good example of this. On the other hand, I tried it to bad effect with one of my submission for the Gotham sf writing class. I still have to rethink whether it's better to start where I wanted to initially...

Hah, hah, LJ, I'm so not amused by the lj_serialadder lunacy. If your answer to a situation is to mock it, then it explains why it's still such a problem.

On days like this, Google's Moonbased offices sounded really good. I left the apartment half an hour late and the Metro was backed up due to mechanical problems with trains.

CVS meeting tonight featured guest speakers from the APA, American Psychological Association, touting and explaining their style manual. The APA style is also apparently heavily used in other social sciences, aside from psychology. The group had an interesting discussion of the different ones from Chicago, MLA and even the dreaded AP style. I even have my old AP stylebook from when I was a journalism student. The Soviet Union is probably still intact according to that copy.

I figure I'm doing well to know a Fed 3rd from a USCA. US Code Annotated is the insanely large set which was a large chunk of my morning workload. The publishers had expanded three of the Constitution volumes into eleven. (At LC, this would have been magnified, since they received 8 or 9 copies on purchase.)

To my shame, I did no work on my newest story idea so I had to fork over my promised money. (We're having a new thing where we can volunteer to pay a certain amount of money, usually a few dollars, if we don't make our goals, with the money going towards some literacy charity.) I'm thinking of melding it with another idea I had years ago, when learning about Irish dancing, if I can find my old notes.

Still not sure what I'll be doing this weekend. If the weather is good, maybe go downtown for the Cherry Blossom festival, although that is something of a rarity. At the meeting, we also received a free pass to see Ella Enchanted, but it's Saturday morning way up on Wisconsin Ave, so we'll see.

The regular CVS meeting included sitting in on a guest author talk, Lauren Winner, author of Girl Meets God and Mudhouse Sabbath. The B&N community liaison had arranged for Winner to tailor her talk somewhat to our needs, answering our questions about writing and publishing. Her first book landed her on the B&N "Discover" program, exploring her spirituality and her conversion from Judaism to Christianity. She told us interestingly that her publisher Random House is doing two paperback editions for Girl Meets God, one geared towards the mainstream and one for their Christian publishing imprint.

Found the Nature magazine with the mummified lion article. The lion was male, suggesting he was possibly a dedication to Mahes, son of Sekhmet. Still no idea why I'm so fascinated with the subject, other than general curiosity.

sailormac: Had you seen this comic explaining Go?

Writing still stalling out. Pat, I'd like to buy a muse please, preferably not one that looks like Sharon Stone and causes chaos in her wake.

CVS had a last minute opportunity to chat with a semi-local author to talk with us about writing. But instead of gathering at our usual nook, the group gathered at a B&N down in Alexandria. Our author Tom Morrisey is an active member of the Alphasmart forum, which is how our Fearless Leader knows him and invited him to talk to us. He provided a rather different focus, since he writes Christian fiction, so he had an interesting insights on how to include aspect of faith and religion in our writing without making it either too cutesy or heavy handed. (Or as I termed it, by turning it into the "Very Special Novel" after watching something on VH1 on successful tv formulas.) Morrisey also read us a chapter from his forthcoming book focusing on the world of Nascar racing. I thought it was interesting that some Christian bookstores would not carry a books if they included certain topics, like drinking, yet he showed a fairly convincing description of a former alcoholic wanting to take just that one sip. I heard the internal conflicts of how to deal with his children and whether his faith could see him through. It wasn't the heavy handed "It's the devil's drink" type stuff. Morrisey preferred to make his characters human. He mentioned actually that the only people who had written Nascar stories before had shown the characters as hellraisers first and then got religion. Usually when I hear about drivers, they've been raised good old Christian boys. His other book Yucatan Deep from Zondervan focused on cave diving and came up with the idea literally on the spot talking to would-be editor remembering a story about a deep diving accident with two partners, one who didn't make it.

I can't escape pirates no matter how hard I try.

( CVS and Tee Morris event )